Just curious on resource efficiency. If I have a list of inserts that need to be accomplished repeatedly which may contain duplicates (there is no way around this, the API I have to work with sucks), ...

I need advise on a table which is part of a development project I'm involved.
A brief summary on the use of the table:
Data from multiple databases will be consolidated in this table for the purpose ...

I have items (tracked with itemid) that have attributes assigned to them (field1,field1 for example). At any given time, field1=val1, field2=val1, ..., fieldn=valn where val1,val1,...,valn = 1..100. ...

What is the best way to get database unique surrogate keys in Microsoft SQL Server when using something like “auto increment” as opposed to GUID's. The purpose is to increase performance over using ...

I recently wanted to share regular access rights with one user of a server and I realized that a simple CREATE USER and GRANT ALL ON DATABASE commands didn't let him run a simple SELECT on the data.
...

When I use SQL Server with an int based identity column, I always use the auto increment. But I'm needing to insert into an existing table that doesn't have the property set, and I'm wondering what ...

In SQL Server, I'm used to creating a #temp table for temporary storage in a complex stored procedure. Not wanting to clutter up the system, I DROP the table when done.
However, if I do the same in ...

I have a SQL Server table with 42 million + records. This table acts as a staging area for transaction records loaded from a different system. Data from this staging table have to be transformed and ...

I have a question that has been bugging me, but I just don't know how to validate it. We run DB2 LUW on AIX in our shop. Our AIX is currently at 7.1. Our DB2 is at 9.7 FP 4 for most installations and ...

I've been working with SQL databases all my life and I am now trying to get into the NoSQL world. I am a looking for a piece of advice on whats the best practice in order to achieve this.
Suppose I ...

I have 3 types of users in my app. The users share some common attributes, but they also have quite a bit of stuff that pertains uniquely to each user type. I have a person table that contains limited ...

If I add or drop columns from a SQL Server table I presume I get page splits or gaps. Since the size of the row has changed.
When I use RedGate SQL Compare to create conversion scripts its strategy ...

I am planing to have a table to store the data based on every hour , in short I have a file with 24 hour data and I need to use this to populate a hourly bar/line graph.
Below is a sample 24hr data ...

In Sql Server, what would the drawbacks and disadvantages be of using a primary key that is:
Two Character Table Identifier + YEAR + MONTH + DAY + HOUR + MINUTE + MILLISECOND + random integer between ...

What is the best practice for storing a discriminator column ? Does it make any difference ?
Any pros/cons of using one over the other ?
I am using MySql with Entity Framework but the question goes ...

this is a question around best practice that I'm currently dealing with.
I have a database (SQL Server 2008 R2) with a heap of tables (around 40)
with data, now the need has risen to have logging of ...

I am working on a project and part of it is an interface tool that executes SQL code stored in a xml file to import/export files.
In the file, temp procedures and temp tables are used quite heavily ...

I have a question table from which agents try to answer 5 questions at a time. Obviously, I want to avoid agent collision i.e. if an agent is answering a question, other agents can not work on it.
Is ...

Let's assume you have a table groups and a table item. Each item belongs to exactly one group. It is an inherent part of that group. An item cannot exist outside of a group and it cannot be moved to ...

What is the reasoning behind using the GO statement after every SQL statement? I understand that GO signals the end of batch and/or allows the reputation of statements but what advantage does it have ...

I'm a database newbie, so please bear with me.
Say I'm creating a library database. I have a table containing information about books. Do you put the book availability as a row in this table or would ...

I came to a new dev team where all development is on the same (instance) of an SQL Server (2005) database once in 1-2 days restored from a current full backup of production database replacing a dev ...

I am a software developer for a small company. I wish we had a dba but not in the cards at this point for this company. I was working on migrating our 75gb SQL Server 2000 database to SQL Server 2008 ...

Current situtation
I am working with a dozen of CSV files containing financial simulations in form of 100'000x100 matrices. Each file is around 100Mb large.
Until now, only analyse these files with ...